Long after human civilisation has perished, there could be a stratum of fossilised rock and a geological time zone that says: “We were here.” So there is a case for calling the present epoch “the Anthropocene” − probably dating from about 65 years ago.
The term Anthropocene derives from the ancient Greek for humankind. And for more than a decade, scientists have been arguing about whether what is officially known as the Holocene epoch of the Quaternary period of the Cenozoic era should be renamed to indicate human impact. There have been arguments in plenty.
Humans have appropriated most of the world’s available fresh water for their own use; as miners, road-makers and city builders, they have become a greater earth-moving force even than wind, water and ice; and they have altered the composition of the atmosphere.
Dramatically altered
They have also dramatically altered the natural land cover, and have pushed into the shadow of extinction an alarming proportion of the other 10 million or so species that share the planet and its resources.
Climate and environmental scientists have frequently invoked the term Anthropocene to highlight the impact of humans on the planet, and even started to think about how and when to date the most significant evidence of change.
But Colin Waters, principal mapping geologist at the British Geological Survey, and colleagues report in Science journal that they put the question in a different form: to what extent are human actions recorded as measurable signals in geological strata? And would the Anthropocene strata be markedly different from the Holocene that began with the end of the last Ice Age nearly 12,000 years ago?
The answer is, yes: the human geological signature could be discerned, across the planet, in materials that were not available in the same way in any previous epoch. The evidence will be, in every sense, concrete.
Read more at Humans’ Indelible Mark on New Era
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